The Revolt Against NATO

A recent
report published in Foreign Policy magazine illustrates quite neatly how the anti-interventionist
cause is making big gains – and how to effect real change in American foreign
policy. The headline reads: “Senators Slam NATO ‘Free Riders’ in Closed Door
Session With Secretary General,” and the story went on to relate how GOP Senators
are suddenly complaining about how and why the burden of NATO falls largely
on Uncle Sam’s sagging shoulders:

“For under an hour, senators grilled [NATO Secretary General Jens] Stoltenberg,
a former prime minister of Norway, about why
only five members of the 28-nation club spend at least 2 percent of their
gross domestic product on defense, the official amount NATO recommends each
nation to set aside. Some expressed particular dissatisfaction with Germany,
the fourth largest economy in the world, which does not meet the 2 percent threshold.”

Although the article claimed that Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) “and other
US officials” have “blasted” our feckless allies for years over this imbalance,
this is the first time we’ve heard about it. Why is that? Well, it’s because
the Republican frontrunner, one Donald J. Trump, is making
an issue of it, and even suggesting that NATO, which he says is “obsolete,”
is a relic of the cold war that ought to be entirely abandoned.

This has the foreign policy Establishment in a panic, with legions
of “experts” rising up to denounce Trump’s heresy as misguided, absurd, and
– of course! – “isolationist.” Yet the politicians can’t afford to be so dismissive:
after all, they have to listen to their constituents, at least to some extent.
And it’s quite telling what Sen. Corker – who has warned
the “Never Trump” crowd to back off – had to say to Stoltenberg:

“I did mention to him that there’s a populism that is
taking place within our country right now, both sides of the aisle. The American
people know that we are a nation spending way beyond our means and when our
European counterparts are not honoring their obligations as they should, at
some point, there’s going to be a breaking point.”

Ah yes, the “breaking point” – we’ve been waiting for it for, lo these many
years, and finally – finally! – it looks like it’s happening. And we
owe it all to an unlikely figure, a New York real estate mogul who has never
run for office and whose public persona is a cross between a reality TV star
and P. T. Barnum. Nobody – including myself – predicted the effect he would
have on the presidential race, and, more importantly, on the political discourse
in this country. Due to Trump’s astounding rise, even the haughty mandarins
in the US Senate are being forced to pay attention and give voice to their usually
very muted criticism of an institution that is the linchpin of our internationalist
foreign policy. As Foreign Policy puts it:

“Donald Trump has spent much of his campaign deriding
NATO allies for ‘ripping off’ the American taxpayer and failing to contribute
to the world’s most powerful military alliance. But on Wednesday, his fellow
Republicans joined the chorus during a closed-door meeting with NATO Secretary
General Jens Stoltenberg on Capitol Hill, according to sources inside the room.”

Corker claims to have raised the issue “in Munich, I have expressed this in
Davos, I have expressed this is every forum where Europeans are listening.”
Now he is finally forced to express it in a forum where Americans are
listening – and that is the key point.

Support for our interventionist foreign policy has never extended much beyond
the Washington Beltway. It’s a common
complaint among the wonkish “experts” who inhabit the thinktanks along the
Potomac that the average American doesn’t have a passport, doesn’t care about
what happens overseas unless it impacts him directly, and is basically one
of those dreaded “isolationists.”

Yet they also reveled in the alleged ignorance of Joe Sixpack, who – up until
this point – hasn’t had any way to protest the billions that flow overseas in
the name of “national security” while our roads and bridges deteriorate and
their tax burden gets heavier by the year. The bipartisan commitment to maintaining
an overseas empire has always muted the voices of ordinary Americans, who would
like nothing better than to mind their own business, and tend to reflexively
oppose meddling in the affairs of other nations. The free-spending lobbyists
over at Lockheed-Martin, General Dynamics, and the rest of the military-industrial
complex were always far more persuasive than NATO’s occasional critics. That’s
now changed, as the Foreign Policy writer explains to his elite audience:

“But what once was an esoteric concern confined to the halls of think tanks
and embassies is now a red-hot campaign issue. Corker said Trump’s campaign
rhetoric speaks to a concern he’s heard from his own Tennessee constituents,
which he relayed to Stoltenberg.”

This illustrates the incalculable value of the Trump campaign for anti-interventionists:
he has taken ideas about America’s role in the world once considered too “extreme”
to be seriously considered and popularized them to the point where the politicians
must respond.
And by suggesting that maybe it’s time for NATO to go the way of the old Soviet
Union – into the dustbin of history – Trump has forced them to move in his direction,
while attempting to salvage what they can:

“Still, a number of senators in the room emphasized that their frustrations
about burden-sharing within the NATO alliance did not mean they see eye-to-eye
with Trump, who has called the alliance ‘obsolete’ and said it may have to dissolve.

“’I believe NATO’s an indispensable alliance,’ said Sen. Marco Rubio, who
suspended his failed presidential campaign last month. ‘It certainly needs
to be modernized but it has a real value to it.’”

“Failed” is a mild term indeed to describe Rubio’s
fate: crushed by Trump in his home state of Florida, the Boy Wonder of the neocons
had no choice but to drop out. The only victories he could point to were Minnesota
(a caucus
state) and the US colony of Puerto Rico. And he was the prime spokesman of the
neoconservative internationalists, who abhor Trump’s “isolationism,” and are
absolutely terrified that his anti-NATO stance will short-circuit their planned
revival of the cold war with Russia. He wasn’t shy about attacking Trump’s call
for America to come home – it was one of his main talking points – and the
voters rejected him soundly and decisively. Ask the average American if they
think NATO is “indispensable” and they’ll look at you as if you’ve gone mad,
because the question that foreign policy mavens in the Beltway don’t care to
ask (or answer) is: “Indispensable” to whom?

That Trump’s supporters are now loudly asking this
question is what has the War Party so terrified that they will apparently stop
at nothing in their campaign to steal the nomination – by hook or by crook –
in a “contested” (i.e. rigged) convention. It isn’t only the enormous sums of
money that are at stake here: the power and prestige of the entire foreign policy
Establishment is at risk. Which is why the internationalists are desperate to
save what they can from the wreckage of what used to be the bipartisan consensus:

“Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said that reasonable people
can disagree about the contributions of NATO members, but Trump’s open speculation
that the alliance may be worth leaving is far outside the mainstream. The United
States has been a member of NATO since it was formed to
counter the Soviet Union in 1949.

“’I think it’s important to explain that Trump isn’t the tip of an iceberg,’
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, told Foreign
Policy. ‘He is a tiny isolated chunk of ice out in the ocean on this.’”

Since 2011, Sen. Murphy has received over
$700,000 in campaign contributions from investment bankers – a category
of donors that depends heavily on America’s willingness to defend their overseas
investments, and that finances the huge arms deals NATO members (including the
US) must make to “modernize” their arsenals. In Sen. Murphy, Goldman-Sachs,
J.P. Morgan, and the rest of that gang are surely getting their money’s
worth.

Murray Rothbard explained the
key role played by the investment bankers in pushing for and maintaining
our interventionist foreign policy. In his fascinating and detailed history
of how the financial elites have dominated and shaped US foreign policy, Rothbard
wrote:

“The great turning point of American foreign policy came
in the early 1890s, during the second Cleveland administration. It was then
that the United States turned sharply and permanently from a foreign policy
of peace and nonintervention to an aggressive program of economic and political
expansion abroad. At the heart of the new policy were America’s leading bankers,
eager to use the country’s growing economic strength to subsidize and force-feed
export markets and investment outlets that they would finance, as well as to
guarantee Third World government bonds. The major focus of aggressive expansion
in the 1890s was Latin America, and the principal enemy to be dislodged was
Great Britain, which had dominated foreign investments in that vast region.”

Using the US military as their unofficial police force, the great financial
combines – the Morgans, the Lehmans, the Rockefellers, et al – were the motor
of American expansionism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Their lobbyists and congressional spear-carriers in Washington created the vaunted
postwar “architecture” of which NATO is the cornerstone, and that is now threatened
by a populist-nationalist uprising. In seeking to head off and stifle this insurgency,
Sen. Murphy, and his internationalist Republican co-thinkers in the “Never Trump”
cabal, are simply defending their financial and personal interests. Yet there
is every indication that they are vastly underestimating the challenge they
face.

Murphy is quite wrong that “Trump isn’t the
tip of an iceberg.” A huge glacier has been lurking beneath the waves of American
politics for many years, and it hasn’t surfaced until now due to lack of a spokesman.

That avatar of populist discontent has now appeared
in the person of Donald J. Trump, who is anything but “a tiny isolated chunk
out in the ocean.” Millions of Americans support Trump precisely because he
is willing to take on the sacred cow of NATO, and the Republican foreign policy
dogma that led us into a disastrous war in Iraq.

The political elites in both major parties have been steering the country toward
an iceberg that they have ignored at their peril. This is what has made the
rise of Trump almost inevitable. And it’s significant that a great deal of his
support comes from the Trumpian critique of our relations with the rest of the
world: not only in regard to questions of war and peace and our alliances, but
also our trade and immigration policies. I plan to deal with the trade issue
in a future column, but for now I’ll just recall that infamous quote
from an unnamed top aide to President George W. Bush (later identified as Karl
Rove) cited by Ron Suskind in the New York Times Magazine during the
Iraq war:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in
what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe
that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. …
That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and
when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously,
as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study
too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all
of you, will be left to just study what we do."

“History’s actors” have led us to one disaster
after another: they have impoverished a once wealthy nation, exhausting its
resources in a futile crusade to remake the world and enrich the few at the
expense of the many – leaving death and much destruction in their wake. And
now the American people are rising up, and saying: “Enough!” No longer content
to be left to just watch helplessly as the Karl Roves of this world wreak havoc
on a global scale, ordinary people are waking up – and standing up.

If populism is anything it is an awakening
– a move away from the traditional passivity of the ordinary citizen and toward
an activist rebellion against the regnant elites. This is the essence of the
Trump campaign, and it is having a salutary effect on the movement to fundamentally
alter and reverse our interventionist foreign policy.

This is what Trump’s many critics – including many
anti-interventionists, and certainly most libertarians – fail to understand.
No one would be talking about the costs of NATO if Trump hadn’t challenged the
conventional wisdom, made it a campaign issue, and put it front and center.
And surely no one would’ve ever imagined the Republican frontrunner calling
out the second Bush administration for lying
us into the Iraq war and disdaining
the Bushian mantra that “he kept us safe.” And in spite of his disgraceful pandering
to AIPAC, Trump’s actual stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – that we
have to be “evenhanded”
– represents a total break
with the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus that would’ve been inconceivable just
a short while ago.

All of this represents a sea change in American
politics, and in the way foreign policy is debated and shaped – and it is having
its effect,, and will continue to reverberate for many years, no matter what
the fate of Trump’s campaign.

Which brings me to my main point – which is that Trump, as a candidate,
is entirely beside the point. What’s significant about his campaign is the tremendous
response he has evoked from voters in every demographic, from coast to coast,
even as he smashes every icon sacred to the globalist-interventionists in both
parties. To ignore this is just sheer blindness – and to condemn it without
deigning to acknowledge its many positive aspects is just plain stupid. Anti-interventionists
who have been toiling in the vineyards for years trying to catch the attention
of Americans should be jumping for joy that people are finally paying attention
to the issues they care about. As Foreign Policy magazine put it:

“[F]or longtime NATO observers, the
unusually high profile of NATO scrutiny is novel for any U.S. election cycle
in recent memory.

“’NATO has never really gotten attention in presidential campaigns before
this year’s with Trump,’ said Robbie Gramer, a NATO expert at the Atlantic Council.
‘The fact that the only attention it has received is through this light underscores
how frustrated the US electorate is with its allies. And NATO really hasn’t
found an effective way to combat this message.’”

The Atlantic Council – which has received money from “more
than two dozen countries since 2008,” including from practically all our
European allies – is one of NATO’s many lobbyists in Washington. Their shtick
up until now has been to ignore ordinary Americans and make their appeal to
the political class. They haven’t had to venture out beyond the Beltway to do
this – and now that they’re forced to do so, they haven’t a clue as to how to
go about doing it.

The American people – thanks to Trump – are finally seeing that our “allies”
are freeloaders and that the vaunted “security architecture” the politicians
and the foreign lobbyists have been building up over the years is an albatross
hung around our necks. Critics of our interventionist foreign policy don’t have
to support Donald Trump’s candidacy to acknowledge their debt to him. They may
not like him, they may abhor his other views – on, say, immigration – but it’s
vitally necessary for them to give him credit where and when it is due. Failure
to do so will result in their complete irrelevance. It’s absolutely imperative
we in the anti-interventionist movement reach out to the millions who will troop
to the polls to vote for Trump, and the millions more who are rooting for him.
And it’s impossible to do that by sitting around virtue-signaling to his critics.

The choice before us is this: anti-interventionists can either
continue their traditional tactics of talking among themselves, or they can
broaden their movement to include the many millions who are now beginning to
question the wisdom of a foreign policy that puts America and Americans last.
As far as I’m concerned, the choice we have to make is too obvious to require
much comment beyond posing the question.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed by going here.
But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often
made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is editor-at-large at Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
View all posts by Justin Raimondo